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So Barry, what you are saying is, you do not like the Will Of The People? Get used to it, its going to be a long 2 years.

“He thought that when I got to Washington I could bring people together and make them work more effectively, and the fact of the matter is that Washington is still gridlocked and still seems obsessed with the short-term and the next election instead of the next generation,” Obama said. “And on that issue, I had to tell him, `You’re right. I am frustrated and you have every right to be frustrated because Congress doesn’t work the way it should.’

That is why the predictions made by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and all the others based on computer models are, by definition, worthless. Computer models cannot predict anything about the vast chaotic global climate system. Even today, meteorologists are mystified by the actions of clouds which can form and disappear in minutes.
It’s useful to keep in mind that climate is measured in centuries, while the weather is reported as what is occurring today and forecast, at best, for no more than a week. Weather records are maintained for purposes of comparison and within the larger context of determining the Earth’s climate cycles. Like those in the past, the present cooling cycle is based on a comparable one of the Sun that is producing lower levels of radiation. You don’t need a Ph.D. in meteorology to understand this.
Carlin does not hesitate to excoriate the blather put forth by the alarmists; particularly their claims that the weather is affected in any significant fashion by human activity and development in particular. “There is simply no evidence thus far that the normal activities of man have or will result in catastrophic outcomes for either man or nature.”

The ex-Bus Driver, after consultations with the men in his cabinet and friendly talks with Fidel, has decided to sacrifice himself to the good of the country. From this point forward, all women (and some cute T-Girls) will be required to copulate with El Hefe, La Salchicha Grande, El Cabeza de Guevo, Nicolás “Huevón” Maduro.

Policy, assembly centers, and hygene requirement will be announced on the next, eagerly awaited, ever popular “en contacto con Maduro” (No mangoes allowed at centers.)

The D.C. Council on Thursday is prepared to consider whether to raise parking ticket fines by $5 and extend the hours for when meters in “premium zones,” which include the busiest commercial districts, will be in effect, from the current 10 p.m. until midnight. Parking ticket fines currently range from $25 to $250, depending on the violation.

At California Polytechnic University-Pomona, for instance, the number of administrators grew 221% from 1975 to 2008. Administrators now outnumber faculty at that school 12,183 to 12,019. In 2010, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor employed 49% more full-time administrative and professional staff than full-time faculty. Nationwide, the number of full-time administrators per 100 students at leading universities grew by 39% between 1993 and 2007, while the number of employees engaged in teaching, research, or service grew only 18%, according to the Goldwater Institute.

Even when schools plead poverty and reduce faculty payrolls, transferring teaching duties to low-paid part time adjuncts, they keep hiring administrators. As a study from the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research discovered, over the past 25 years the ratio of non-academic to academic positions, at both public and private universities, has doubled. When asked, college presidents blamed funding cuts and talk about efforts to cut costs. But the “funding cut” story is a “fairy tale”:

“In other words,” according to one recent New York Times column, “far from being caused by funding cuts, the astonishing rise in college tuition correlates closely with a huge increase in public subsidies for higher education.” Likewise, the cost-cutting is largely bogus: As economist Richard Vedder of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity says, “I wouldn’t buy a used car from a university president. They’ll say, ‘We’re making moves to cut costs,’ and mention something about energy-efficient lightbulbs, and ignore the new assistant to the assistant to the associate vice provost they just hired.”

Certification of the Falcon 9 under the revised agreement is expected no later than the end of June 2015, the Air Force command said. SpaceX had filed suit in 2014 contesting the $11 billion sole-source EELV contract to ULA, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In January, SpaceX agreed to drop the lawsuit, while the Air Force said the company could compete for future contracts once its certification was complete.
“We look forward to completing the certification process and competing for EELV missions,” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell stated.

The announcement, which the ratings agency released Tuesday afternoon, cited a recent Illinois court ruling voiding state pension reforms. Moody’s said it saw a negative outlook for the city’s credit.

Following that May court decision, Moody’s said it believes that “the city’s options for curbing growth in its own unfunded pension liabilities have narrowed considerably.”

..

Mayor Rahm Emanuel criticized the downgrade.
“While Chicago’s financial crisis is very real and at our doorsteps, today’s irresponsible decision by Moody’s to downgrade the City’s credit by two steps goes far beyond that reality,” he said. “Their decision was driven solely by the overturning of a state pension bill that did not include Chicago’s pension reform, yet they did not downgrade the State of Illinois.”

Chicago’s finances are already sagging under an unfunded pension liability Moody’s has pegged at $32 billion and that is equal to eight times the city’s operating revenue. The city has a $300 million structural deficit in its $3.53 billion operating budget and is required by an Illinois law to boost the 2016 contribution to its police and fire pension funds by $550 million.

The downgrade and violation of terms on the swaps agreement likely will become an issue in Emanuel’s re-election campaign. The first-term mayor, a former chief of staff to President Barack Obama, failed on Tuesday to win a majority of votes in a primary election, and faces a runoff vote April 7 against a Cook County commissioner, Jesus “Chuy” Garcia.

Some Chicago debt is trading at worse levels than bonds sold by Illinois, which is paying the biggest yield penalty among states in the U.S. municipal bond market due to its own fiscal woes.

The spread on Friday for Chicago bonds due in 2019 over the market’s benchmark triple-A scale hit 125 basis points, which is 25 basis points over Illinois’ so-called credit spread, according to Municipal Market Data.

Someone go up to the big houseEnglewood and ask Rod where the money went.

Wilson has tried to keep on the right side of ITAR law. He’s asked them in at least 10 separate official requests to tell him if his original Liberator plans actually fall under its jurisdiction. He’s also inquired if if his current main project, the “Ghost Gunner,” a home CNC mill which allows individuals to make metal AR-15 lower receivers at home without serial numbers, falls under ITAR. (Such a request is known as a “commodity jurisdiction” request.)

Their answer, if I’m reading the suit correctly, is that the hardware does not but that software does. The suit details at length a confusing series of bureaucratic buck-passing from the ITAR people that makes it very hard for Wilson and Defense Distributed to know whether their planned activities will bring criminal punishment down on them.

Wilson said in a phone interview this morning that he’s trying to get all Ghost Gunner customers to affirm that they are U.S. citizens, since he fears if he sells one to a non-citizen (which could constitute “export”) he just might run afoul of ITAR.

Turning serious, Marquez tells the crowd that the socialist revolution, launched 16 years ago by the late Hugo Chavez, is collapsing under the weight of bad policies and corrupt public officials.

That message doesn’t sit well with Venezuela’s president, Nicolas Maduro. Besides jailing opposition leaders and cracking down on protesters, the Maduro government is now going after comics.

Marquez says that three of his recent shows were canceled after all three clubs that booked him were suddenly closed down for alleged tax evasion. He’s also been shut out of government-run theaters and hotels.

“You’re from all over the country,” LoBiondo told the opening of the general session at AUVSI on 6 May. “Get to know your member of Congress. Give them real-world applications. Explain the stories of issues that will save lives… that are unfolding every day.”

‘Hey we gotta’ eat, you know. As Bubba said quite well recently, “We have to pay our bills.” and it’s expensive running a re-election campaign. You know what I mean. Nice Industry you got started there, be a shame if some regulatory ‘thing’ happens. Tu capisci?’

The two 3-inch-by-1-inch glass chips held the unfathomable amount of genetic information contained in 16 human genomes. On Thursday, a technician placed the chips — called flow cells — in a new genetic sequencing machine at the Genome Institute at Washington University and closed the door.In just three days, the task will be complete.It’s mind-boggling given that it took scientists working all over the world more than 10 years and about $1 billion to first sequence the human genome, a feat declared officially complete in 2003.
This ultra-fast sequencing machine, which hit the market last year, is only sold in groups of 10 — a system capable of sequencing 18,000 human genomes a year at just $1,000 to $1,500 per genome.

These 12 car companies are lobbying hard to make working on the electrical and computer components of your own car illegal. General Motors has told the Copyright Office that proponents of copyright reform mistakenly “conflate ownership of a vehicle with ownership of the underlying computer software in a vehicle.”
General Motors also says that your car qualifies as a “mobile computing device.” Tinkering with it, therefore, could be a copyright violation because although you do own your car, you do not own the computer code inside it. Jail-breaking your iPad is currently illegal for the same reason. By the way, jail-breaking your iPhone is still legal; it’s just one more example of a government regulation that is full of double standards.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has promised to nationalise food distribution in the South American nation beset with record shortages of basic goods, runaway inflation and an escalating economic crisis.
During a rally on Friday, on International Workers’ Day, the socialist leader allowed a union activist to ask for the nationalisation of food and essential-item distribution.
Various estimates suggest the government already controls about half of the country’s food distribution, but that hasn’t stopped record shortages in shops and markets.

President Nicolas Maduro raised Venezuela’s minimum wage Friday to help workers being battered by the world’s highest inflation.

Speaking at a May Day rally, the socialist leader said he is boosting the minimum wage and pensions for retirees by 30 percent, with two-thirds of the increase coming this month and the rest on July 1. He also said he would raise salaries for government employees and military personnel.

ou can donate blood, plasma, eggs, and sperm. Why not poop? Yes, your feces are perhaps your greatest untapped monetary resource. Thanks to a nonprofit organization called OpenBiome, you can cash in to the tune of $13,000 a year — and save lives while you’re at it.
Since 2013, OpenBiome has been processing and shipping loads of it all over the country. The frozen stool is administered to patients who are very sick with infections of a bacteria called C. difficile. The bacteria can cause extreme gastrointestinal distress, leaving some sufferers housebound. Antibiotics often help, but sometimes the bacteria rears back as soon as treatment stops. That leads to a miserable, continuous course of antibiotics.

Soros may have found another way to defer paying taxes on fees. After Congress placed restrictions on U.S. investors in offshore funds in 1986, Soros created a security that enabled partners in his firm to defer taxes and convert ordinary income into lower-taxed capital gains, according to the person familiar with the firm’s finances. In 2010, Soros revived that maneuver by having Quantum Endowment issue $3 billion of convertible preferred partnership interests to “related parties” of Soros Fund Management, according to the Irish financial filings.

Now that government has lots of power, people look to it to create jobs. Communist countries had five-year plans. They didn’t work.
That’s because jobs come from government getting out of the way and letting employers produce goods.
Every new layer of regulations sounds nice — protecting the environment, providing more health care, forbidding discrimination against disabled people — but most rules do more harm than good.
Humans have needs and desires. Entrepreneurs see those needs as opportunity. They hire people not out of generosity or because government told them to — but because it’s profitable to employ people if they produce valuable goods.
If it’s not profitable, that means those people would be better employed doing something else. The prices customers are willing to pay and the wages workers accept are the best indication of which jobs can be done profitably and therefore ought to be done.

Don’t some call for the arrest and jailing of people who “Deny the Science” of Economics

Russian state-owned natural gas firm Gazprom had a rough go of it last year, to say the least, as net profits fell 86 percent. The FT reports:

Gazprom, the world’s biggest gas producer which accounts for about a fifth of Russian government revenue, reported on Wednesday that net income attributable to its shareholders for 2014 fell to Rbs159bn ($3.1bn) from Rbs1.1tn in 2013.

A weak ruble goes a long way towards explaining this plunge in profitability, but so too can the company’s decision to shut off gas to Ukraine, one of its biggest customers. So far thanks to a lag in the pricing model, the fall in the price of oil—a benchmark that Gazprom looks to when setting its own gas prices—isn’t yet reflected in the company’s balance sheets. In fact, Gazprom reported that the average price at which Europe bought its gas was up 11 percent in 2014.

Not a good sign for Vlad’s neighbors. When will he raise the dead specter, of debts still owed to the motherland, and start moving troops to more borders?

"The welfare of humanity is always the alibi of tyrants." - Albert Camus

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